On William Lane Craig’s defense of the Canaanite genocide (Part 2)

In my first installment in this series I argued that conservative Christian apologists like William Lane Craig and Paul Copan are at their weakest when they argue that God commanded putative moral atrocities like genocide. And I noted that the interlocutor for my critical discussion would be William Lane Craig’s defense of the Canaanite genocide in a recent Reasonable Faith podcast. Just to be clear on the terms of discussion, Craig aims in this podcast to remove defeaters to the claim that God commanded the Canaanite genocide as recorded in various biblical texts. I will argue that Craig has failed to remove those defeaters.

While I was initially intending to jump right into the critique in this second installment, upon further reflection I concluded it important to take some time to articulate just what those defeaters are exactly. Rather than reinvent the wheel I’ll begin by quoting from the seven step argument that forms the backbone of my 2009 essay “Let Nothing that Breathes Remain Alive.” (You can read the entire essay in the “Academic Articles” section of my website.) So here’s the argument:

(1) God is the most perfect being there could be.

(2) Yahweh is God.

(3) Yahweh ordered people to commit genocide.

(4) Genocide is always a moral atrocity.

(5) A perfect being would not order people to commit a moral atrocity.

(6) Therefore, a perfect being would not order people to commit genocide (4,5).

(7) Therefore, Yahweh did not order people to commit genocide (1,2,6).

Note that the argument is not questioning (1) and (2). Rather, it questions (3) and (4). It does so based on assumptions of moral perception or what Christians might refer to as a subset of the deliverances of general revelation. Elsewhere I have also supplemented this appeal with arguments internal to the biblical text itself by focusing on the life of Jesus as the controlling hermeneutical principle for understanding scripture and the nature of God. (See, for example, my essay “Would Jesus stone a misbehaving child?”) But here I’ll focus on the arguments from moral perception.

Defining Genocide

Let’s focus on (4). We begin with a definition of genocide. This is important because too often one finds some Christian apologists attempting to claim that the prescriptions outlined in a passage like Deuteronomy 20:10-20 and the events summarized in passages like Joshua 6-11 and 1 Samuel 15 do not constitute genocide. On the contrary, these are eminently clear instances of genocide. The term “genocide” derives from two terms — Greek: genos (race, kind) and Latin: cida (killer) — and thus denotes the intentional killing of a particular race or kind of people.

Intentionality is important here. Let’s say that the last thousand members of a particular race are gathered in an airport hanger when the hanger is mistakenly blown up by one of Barack Obama’s drone strikes. The bombing event would have wiped out an entire race of people but it would not thereby constitute a genocide of the people because there was no intention to eliminate this entire race. By contrast, intentional killing of several dozen of that same group because they are ethnically identified with that group would constitute acts of genocide.

The idea of classifying acts of intentional killing of individuals because of their racial or ethnic identity traces to Raphael Lemkin, a survivor of the Holocaust. Lemkin rightly recognized that the acts of the Nazis in the Final Solution were not mass killings simpliciter and he labored to find a conceptual distinction to explain the unique horror of these crimes. Thus we have the genesis of the concept of genocide which finally gained legal recognition at the United Nations in 1948 with the adoption of “The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide”. This document defined genocide as “acts committed with intention to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”. It then went on to identify five conditions under which this definition would apply. We need concern ourselves with only the first and most obvious instance, viz. “Killing members of the group.”

By this definition, there are several mass killings in the Old Testament which would qualify as genocides. For example, Deuteronomy 20:16-17 describes God as declaring: “in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.” According to this direction, members of these six ethnical, religious and cultural groups should all be killed. In 1 Samuel 15 a similar directive is given outlining the mass killing of all individuals identified as Amalekites.

Now obviously given that the term genocide is a post-WWII conceptual distinction, there is a certain anachronism in applying it to events prior to that period. Nonetheless, nobody has a problem describing the Final Solution as a genocidal act based upon the currently accepted definition of genocide. Neither should one have a problem describing the biblically recorded killing directives referenced above as genocidal directives based upon the same United Nations definition.

Condemning genocide

Now how should we think ethically about genocide as defined above, viz. the intentional killing of an entire racical, ethnical or cultural group of individuals from infants to the elderly simply based on their identity with that group? The response is captured in the title of Barbara Coloroso’s book on the subject: Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide (Penguin, 2007). Virtually everyone recognizes acts of genocide as acts of extraordinary evil. Even the socially despised Holocaust denier concedes the evil of genocide in his offensive and tortured historical reconstructions of the Final Solution as not really a genocide after all.

The fact is that we have excellent grounds to believe based upon moral reflection on accounts of genocide that such actions constitute moral atrocities. Whether it be Rwanda in 1994 or Germany in 1944 the moral offense is the same. And so we likewise have strong prima facie grounds to believe that genocides committed in the Ancient Near East would also constitute moral atrocities. If we are persuaded categorically and a priori that God could not have approved of the Rwanda genocide or the Nazi genocide because the type action genocide is a moral atrocity and these are tokens of that type, we have prima facie grounds to believe God would not have approved of ANE token examples of the type.

Imagine that Mr. X is arrested for raping a person. He defends the action by claiming that he raped the person because Yahweh commanded him to rape the person. You recognize that Yahweh can command some very extraordinary actions. But you do not seriously consider Mr. X’s claim that rape could be one of those actions. Your reason for this may derive in part from biblical considerations. But the deeper tap root for judging Mr. X’s claim is surely drawn straight from the faculty of moral perception. Simply by reflecting on the very concept of rape one can see that it is a moral atrocity and thus deserving of unqualified moral and legal censure. One way to see the role of moral perception in your reasoning about the case is found in the fact that the average person’s rejection of Mr. X’s claim far exceeds their ability to reproduce biblical texts and to exegete those texts in support of that moral response. In other words, the moral condemnation is immediate and unqualified, but the biblical support for it would be subsequent to this immediate and unqualified moral judgment. And so it follows that the biblical support cannot be the primary source of the moral judgment. (To put it more simply, the primary source for our moral condemnation of rape is general revelation through moral perception rather than special revelation.)

Although it is unlikely that we would bother to articulate our reasoning in the following way, certainly I would expect any Christian to be satisfied with the following argument as a formal moral basis for rejecting Mr. X’s claim:

(1) God is the most perfect being there could be.

(2) Yahweh is God.

(3′) Mr. X claims that Yahweh ordered him to rape a person.

(4′) Rape is always a moral atrocity.

(5) A perfect being would not order people to commit a moral atrocity.

(6′) Therefore, a perfect being would not order people to rape (4′,5).

(7′) Therefore, Yahweh did not order Mr. X to rape (1,2,6′).

This presents the defender of ANE genocides with a problem. Is it plausible based on moral perception (perception which is properly understood from a Christian perspective to be a deliverance of general revelation) to conclude that (4′) is correct but (4) is false? To say the least, this seems implausible. And as such, it would place an enormous burden on an apologist for particular ANE genocides to argue how (4′) could be true but (4) false.

Of course, one could argue that (4′) is not true. (This would be equivalent to conceding that there are feasible possible worlds — even if the actual world is not among them — where God does command rape and rape is thereby morally obligatory and/or praiseworthy.) But I’ve met very few apologists willing to bite that bullet. This leaves many in a difficult ethical dilemma in which they agree with the deliverances of moral perception that (4′) is true and yet deny that (4) is true even though the moral perceptual condemnation of genocide is every bit as strong as the moral perceptual condemnation of rape.